Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Thursday January 10, 2002 @03:54PM
from the sinking-to-a-new-low dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo is now putting ad banners as news stories. This is highly misleading and is an awesome way to sell out."
I don't really think Yahoo has been sold in in a few years, but this
is a new level of yucky. No doubt it is a sign of things to come:
the news is the ad. The ad is the news. It's one step worse then the
bizarre advertising/news merge that was amazingly evident when Disney/ABC was doing
with Monsters Inc while Time/Warner/AOL/CNN was hyping Harry Potter.
Oh, in case they change it, basically they have a list of news stories,
and one of them links simply to a page advertising (not surprisingly) X-10. The link isn't marked as an ad -- its simply one of the headlines in
the news list. It's one thing to have more ads... it's another to
simply disguise the ad as actual news. Update The ad was yanked.
For those who missed it, there were a dozen news articles, but one
was an advertisement. It was indistinguishable from the actual news.

I noticed today that Yahoo started putting ads up that interrupt you -- i.e. you click a headline and an add page comes up, with a link to the real story -- forcing you to find the link and absorb the ad for a second.

Is this all we're talking about, or is there something more "sinister" going on that I missed?

Neither. The offending item in question is the section on the right hand of the page under 'Advertisement'. Sometimes it loads as a box of links that look like news. Sometimes it loads as something else that is obviously an ad. Reload the page a few times and you'll get it.
(I posted this down below, but nobody seems to have noticed yet.)

I can't find any links directly to banner ads either. Perhaps the page which was supposed to come up just loaded it's ad banner and then stalled out, leaving a blank page with just a scantily clad woman and a suggestion that you can use the camera for 'all kinds of things'?

Using Mozilla 0.9.6 on Mac OS 10.0.4, and with Javascript enabled all I saw was a regualr financial news page. No popups, no popunders. A banner add for an X-10 camera at the top of the page. Various stories about the recession and budget surplus in the larger table cells, and links to other sites and clearly labled text ads in the smaller ones.

Nothing sinister, or even as annoying as most other news sites nowadays.

Question: Was this just crying wolf, or are they doing random tests of this? (Like I noticed most people report pop under ads, which I didn't get)

It seems to be a random ad on the right column of the screen for a company called TechnoScout. It's a column of links with titles like:

Space program research creates "smart bed" sleep surface

Unique formulation combats oxygen deficiencies without chemicals

But when you click on one of them, it just takes you to a page with product and ordering information. It's pretty obvious to me that it's a advertisement (especially since there's a note on top of it that reads 'Advertisement').

Am I the only one who didn't see the advertising link in question? I know there's this large banner on the right that says 'ADVERTISEMENT' at the top, but they've had that for months, and you'd have to be a moron to think they're putting it forward as real news...

When I saw this on the/. front page, there wern't any comments yet. I immediately clicked the link to yahoo, and I could find no ads presented as news headlines. I'm quite certain yahoo couldn't have pulled it THAT fast.

Half the headline links DO point to non-yahoo sites, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if one of those sites use those newfangled interrupting ads that make you wait 10 seconds or some crap before the actual page appears. I've seen ads like that break on more than one occasion, and I wouldn't be surprised if thats what caused the fuss.

The offending item in question is the section on the right hand of the page under 'Advertisement'. Sometimes it loads as a box of links that look like news. Sometimes it loads as something else that is obviously an ad. Reload the page a few times and you'll get it.

If that's it, I don't get the 'offending' part, then. It's a vertical banner space. Sometimes (usually) there is an annoying blinking banner, sometimes there is this ad from "Techno Scout" that has hyperlinks to product pages on technoscout.com

Are we bitching about ads that are hyperlinks? I've seen this ad on a few other sites, not just Yahoo! and it doesn't seem that confusing or misleading to me. (Is anyone going to think "Workout technology that provides safe, easy-to-change resistance" is supposed to be a news item?)

I was expecting to have one of the news item links pop up an x-10 ad. That would be wrong.

I scanned through the news articles and while an x10 ad (and boy, why does it have to be x10) popped up underneath the news article, I didn't see any articles merely being links to advertisements. What am I missing here?

I sent an e-mail to X10 a few days ago when I'd finally had enough. Complaining about the existence of the ads? No -- that's sure to fall in their category of "necessary evil", i.e. marketing dollars, and I knew that if I was to have any chance of not being deleted (vicariously through my e-mail), I'd better not trip down that lane.

No, what I objected to was the content of the ads. Now, call me a prude if you must, but frankly I am turned off by a company who will insist on popping up ads which feature shots of cameras panning over scantily-clad females and lingering on the cleavage whilst accompanied by a tag line reading "see what you're missing" or "who knows what you'll see?". Okay, so I'm an adult -- what about those parents who (rightly or wrongly) wish to be able to have their children surf the Net through a supposedly safe medium such as Yahoo and not be inundated with sleazy ads?

We all know that children aren't safe from the spammers or the mistyped domain names that have been pounced upon by the porn people; but they're up-front (yes, ha-ha, no pun intended) about their intentions. X10, on the other hand, is just being tacky, and overloading at least this particular consumer with their tackiness.

By the way, I also pointed out to them that, for what it was worth, I am probably in one of their prized target demographics -- early 30s and technically astute with a reasonable amount of disposable cash.

Hating X10 ads doesn't make you a prude at all. I have no problem with images of scantily clad or nude women, or even with hard-core pornography. What worries me about the X10 ads is the implication (and don't tell me it isn't there) that they can and should be used for voyeurism. The combination of that suggestion with the ubiquitous nature of the ads is truly offensive.

What worries me about the X10 ads is the implication (and don't tell me it isn't there) that they can and should be used for voyeurism.

You don't have anything to worry about. Their cameras are such pieces of shit that they can't be used for much of anything. Completely worthless in almost all lighting conditions. You wouldn't even be able to make out the face of the woman you were spying on, let alone any detail of her "mommy parts"...

I was searching for information via www.hotbot.com, and in my search I put -sex -porn, which filtered the sexual adult content BUT the ad system the hotbot used still displayed ads for adult content that could easily be called "lude". I sent them an email with a nice complaint basically saying that there advertising for thing some explicitly doesn't want to see, and they should probably display something else.
I ran the same search everyday, for a week, when it stopped doing that. They never did reply to my eMail. Imagine my surprise.

What I can't wait for is the day that some girl sues the pants off of X10.com when some guy she slept with sends pictures of their deed all over the net. It's pretty clear to me that they're selling the camera with the expressed intent of having the purchaser use it to capture voyeristic images without the consent of the person being photographed.

A simple browse through the X-10 Website will reveal this [x10.com] page, which details their advertising policies.

They even allow you to run a cookie which will completely disable X-10 Ads. All you have to do is click here [x10.com] and it X-10 ads will never again appear for the next month or so, then just click on it again to reset the cookie.

It isn't that hard folks....theres no need to bitch about it, just fix it!

All you have to do is click here and it X-10 ads will never again appear for the next month or so, then just click on it again to reset the cookie.

If all you have to do to get me to stop leaving burn bags of dog crap on your front porch is to ask me, does that make it ok for me to leave those shitbombs until you say otherwise? (With the understanding that I'm free to start up again in a months time unless you keep repeating your request?)

Annoying and rude behavior is not ok even if the offendor agrees to cut it out when asked.

I agree that it's not just the act of delivering these ads that's so bothersome. While the X10 ads always bother me for the inconvenience of closing them, the content doesn't really bother me when I'm just at home surfing for entertainment...

... but when I'm using the net at the office (semi-open concept cube farm) and the "scantily-clad females" etc. pop-up it really makes me reconsider using that particular site. Not always an option with the proliferation of the ads on financial news sites and other resources with unique content.

I understand the need to make money and to employ "creative" techniques, but I think that Yahoo and others are running the risk of hurting their credibility with the key business user demographic by allowing racy pop-up/under ads that are inappropriate for most offices and that can slow down research efforts (and occasionally crash the browser or OS, especially when you've got multiple business aps open).

On top of that, if the ads were any worse, I wouldn't be surprised if someone takes it even further in this crazy Politically Correct world of ours and sues an employee/er for harrassment just for walking by the screen! I've heard of dumber things happenning...

...and I'm no prude. In fact, the content of the ads doesn't get the least bit of rise out of me in any way; it's way too tame for that.

BUT... I do object to having companies in general resort to using the absolutely most base and crass material in order to sell their product. It's ugly, it doesn't add to anyone's experience, it shows a lack of intelligence on their part, and (perhaps most importantly) they imply that their customers and customers-to-be can't think rationally and make all our purchasing decisions with our genitalia.

My conspiracy theory of the day is that CNN also inserts subliminal advertising in their news coverage. During some of their special coverage, they have this undulating blue band across the bottom of the screen upon which titles appear. In the midst of the seemingly-random pattern of waves, I once saw a vague silhouette of the Warner Brothers logo appear. The person I was with at the time saw it too, after I pointed it out. It floated around for a few seconds, then disappeared. Has anyone else seen anything like this?

What is the deal here. I can only find a coloum clearly marked Advertising. This has been done by UK sites for a while by the way. I feel sorry for Yahoo as I thought they were quite cool earlier on but now has pretty much nothing but "milk toast" to offer.

Press releases have been masquerading as news for a long time. I worked in a small office once where we sent out press releases saying that this person had sold so much insurance or that person had sold so many dollars worth of real estate. They were advertisements, pure and simple. But they were presented in the local paper as a real news story.

The only difference is that in this case the ad is paid for and presented as news instead of being "free" for those places that write their own press releases.

There's no way to 'block' flash ads in Mozilla yet, and Yahoo keeps throwing up this damn huge Oracle/IBM ad on the my.yahoo.com page I have.

squid-redir [taz.net.au] lets you block anything from anywhere, based on the URL. This rule, for instance, blocks all Flash at the Motley Fool [fool.com]:

//.*.fool.com/.*.swf BLANK

It substitutes a 1x1 transparent GIF for the Flash. Something similar would work elsewhere...if you want to cut off all Flash from all sites, you can do that:

//.*.swf BLANK

It works on any system that can run Squid and Perl, and it'll work with any browser (I usually use IE, though I also have Lynx, Konqueror, and iCab available). More info and the block list I'm currently using are available here [dyndns.org]. Here are the Yahoo-related rules I'm currently using:

I've been using My Yahoo for awhile now to get my news, but the corporate bias is pretty evident; stories always seem to have a twinge of flavor in favor of the dollar. Whenever I see 'evil cyberterrorist arrested' I typically hit slashdot to get the REAL story.

The popups Yahoo uses are even getting past my disabled Javascript lately. If I have to deal with headlines as ads on top of bias and popups, well... bye!

Does anybody know of a news portal type site which goes EASY on this sort of thing? Ads where they ought to be rather than ads all over the place, including in the news headlines themselves? Is there an acceptable 'mainstream' news outlet that's not as invasive as this?

How can anything that has the label "ADVERTISEMENT" (in all caps, to boot) above it be considered 'highly misleading'? It seems pretty clear to me....

Okay, you don't have to like this type of advertisement and there can be thoughts about the 'psudo journalism' feel of it, but as long as it says that it's an add, how is it any different from the "Special Advertisement Section" that shows up periodically in Newsweek, Discover, Sports Illustrated, etc.? Just ignore it and continue reading what you want to read....

They're putting ads between letting you read articles and the like. It seems to happen randomly as far as I can tell and they're doing it on http://groups.yahoo.com/ too - that's where I first came across it. It's unpleasant to say the least, but not dishonest.

I quit watching TV as a teen because I was tired of the brainwashing. These days if I'm visiting someone who has it on I will watch with them so as to not be a snob. Recently I caught a little bit of Good Morning America. I was amazed by how much of the show is blatant advertising for products. My friend said most other "information" shows on TV are the same way. Every outlet in our culture is being geared towards the Consumerist movement.

So now the "News" sites on the Internet are doing the same thing. It's sad to see the progression of the Internet from a bastion of equal speech to yet another Consumerism-in-overdrive medium.

If slashdot starts redirecting the "Reply" button to ad sites, I'll post all my karma-capped UIDs/passwords on a first-come, first-served basis. The advertisers will win, and so will the trolls.

Just the other day, I was sitting on my couch watching the news on TV, and suddenly up pops a series of advertisements for various products! Nowhere on the TV screen did the disclaimer "this is an advertisement" appear, in fact the only warning of any kind was the news anchor saying " . . . back after these messages."

Seriously, if we don't like it, we need to show our displeasure by not visiting the site (as if I needed another reason not to visit Yahoo.) Now if CNN starts publishing headlines like "4 out of 5 Terrorists Prefer Crest(TM)", then we are in trouble.

It's similar to when you visit something like moviepost and there is a link to Teen Sux and Fux and it's really a link to another pr0n portal site.

I think the difference though is two-fold. Movie post stopped doing this. Picpost, it's sister site also started labeling these types of links as another 'Gallery'. Secondly, this is pr0n site and you expect some underhandedness.

Yahoo[!] is a site that people expect some level of professionalism. I've gotten so many of our family members to use Yahoo as a portal because it's still somewhat lightweight, and easy to use. Yahoo also goes back a long way... to when I was 15 ['95-'96?] and I figured they weren't into this sort of thing.

I guess I should point my family members [read: Newbies] to Google for more than searches... I hope their directory gets better.

I followed the link and the "news" stories are clearly marked as an advertisement. Perhaps not blazingly marked, but the section that they're all in has the word Advertisement over it. It is also on the right side of the page where there is typically a advertisement banner, so if you have decent location memory (read: consistent page design)for ad placements, it should be noticeable as such.

It looks like all of the things in the "Technoscout" section are simply advertisements/product offerings displayed as news-like articles or press releases.

None of the articles in the main sections had any advertisements mixed in with them.

As if half of the "technology" news on major sites isn't copied straight out of corporate press releases anyway. The story about "100x Compression" Slashdot featured a little while ago was from Reuters, but that doesn't mean it wasn't 99% marketing baloney.

Not that blurring the line between news and advertising is a good thing, but I do sympathize with Yahoo's position. Money must be tight over there, and every ad they link to as "news" means less time paying writers to rewrite coporate advertising into "pseudo-news"!

The nice thing about the NYT Sponsored Feature, by contrast, is that they have a great deal of good content in their archives, and presumably the sponsorship goes into getting the stuff off microfilm and out of file drawers and onto their web pages.

Don't forget that lots of portal companies depend on ad revenues to support their business. Yahoo gives an awful lot away, it stands to reason that they'd try everything they can to get some revenue coming in.

This really isn't anything new, though. I regularly see advertisements (in particular on TechTV) that are done well enough that, if I'm not really paying attention at first, I have to do a double-take and look for the "Paid Advertisement" text to make sure it's not an actual show of some sort. Anything to expose those products to viewers' eyeballs.

Really, though, who's surprised by this given the recent collapse of banner ad revenue on the web?

The news article says last updated at 2:05 PM, this was posted at 2:54 PM.
This/. story is obviously incorrect now... at 3:00 EST... So does this mean that it was a goof on Yahoo's part? Does that mean that/. needs to appologize for criticizing Yahoo for selling out?
I would just love to know what all is going on with this... a mistake (or two) were made.The mistake could have been somebody not checking up on the story before posting it, the webmaster on yahoo making a mistake, or us for believing it that Yahoo is above this and that they covered their tracks when they were caught.

This doesn't suprise me one bit. At the risk of repeating the tired old mantra, concentration of big media will lead to lapses in journalistic integrity driven by the bottom line. I noticed the following recently: MSNBC did a piece last week about how well the X-box was selling (depite the fact that the PS2 out sold it 2:1 during the holiday season). Disclaimer: I have a PS2. The piece was done by a reporter who gave his two sons (14 and 17 I think) a X-box and see if they liked it. Suprise: they did. Thumbs up for the X-box. No disclaimer at the end of the story that Microsoft owns X% of MSNBC. You have to be a smart cookie today to see through the bullsh*t.

Well, not TOO much of a smart cookie to determine that MSNBC is partially owned by MS:P However, doing that is a signifigant lapse in journalistic integrity, and a magazine journalist doing it would probably get raked over the coals.

I can't believe you had the nerve to take a screen shot using Internet Explorer and post it to Slashdot.

Well it may be be some special form of humor, an old english tradition called irony, which is often very subtle and misunderstood. Maybe not. Whatever.

What bugs me more is the fact I can't believe someone in the/. had the nerve of posting this highly irrelevant story. I am not complaining... obviously my slashcrap-detector is broken or needs cleaning or something.

In an insidious trend, Yahoo and Slashdot began leveraging what is commonly known as the "Slashdot Effect" to generate revenue-producing pageviews on the popular directory service. An anonymous source, who we will call Cmdr Tapas commented; "It's really very easy - we post an inflammatory article about Yahoo on our service, our readers flock over there with torches and pitchforks, and Yahoo pockets the pageviews. Then I get a fat check sent to my home a month later."

My girlfriend used to work in the advertising department of a reasonably big website.

They went out of their way to make their advertising and their news blend together to the point that it was tough to tell one from the other. Little advertising snippets complete with links would be written up as though they were headlines on the news page. When you clicked on the links, you either went through to the manufacturer, or you went to some rah-rah fluff an internal copy writer had sketched up.

I was originally going to mention the site she worked at, but by the end of this post, I thought better. Never makes sense to burn any bridges...
:-)

Are we sure they're really doing this? At least on the page I got when I clicked the link, I didn't see any such thing. Perhaps it was a *gasp* minor error or mistake. Like that never happens here at Slashdot...;-P

Even though I did not see anything unusual at Yahoo. This sounds exactly like the ads in every computer magazine I subscribe to. There are multi page articles that look like news stories except in small print at the top of the page it says "Special advertising supplement" or other such crap.

The following is from the MacQuarie dictionary. I found it quite amusing.

yahoonoun 1. a rough, coarse or uncouth person. --interjection 2. an exclamation expressing enthusiasm or delight. --phrase 3. yahoo around, to act in a rough, loutish manner. [from Yahoo, one of a race of brutes having the form of human beings and embodying all the degrading passions of humanity, in Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift]

The link doesn't seem to be there anymore. And I don't think Yahoo! would be stupid enough to do this . . . just about anyone would think twice about visiting Yahoo! News after being hoodwinked like that a few times.

Not to mention that the first time I loaded the page, it actually had an X10 ad on it. Mixing up a legitimate news link with an ad link would be a trivial scripting error.

One of the neat things I notice is that all of the links within the ad point through the Yahoo ad site (rd.yahoo.com). As a way of avoiding massive downloads of crap I don't care about, I routinely add these sites (can you say doubleclick?) to my hosts file. Now I guess I have to go through the annoyance of hand editing their URLs before I can view the articles.

I wonder how long it will be before these types of redirects are moved onto the server side, with non-obvious redirects, to force you to click onto the ad site.

lately? I'm so tired of the advertising blitz you get when you go to use a search engine these days. Especially the pop ups. Thank goodness for google.

Ultimately these types of advertising tactics will not prevail, as people simply will use something else. And there will always be some new site waiting to take market share away from companies who do this.

Right click on any image... say ones produced by ads.x10.com -- or maybe us.a1.yimg.com -- or everyone's favorite ads.doubleclick.net... and then you're presented with a nice option to "Block Images From This Server". Thanks Mozilla [mozilla.org]!

I mean... there are sites that advertise nothing BUT X10. Those crappy little cameras must be selling like hotcakes, or they're getting that adspace dirt cheap. Is it just good marketing? I know the product sucks, so they can't be relying on the business of repeat customers. X10 makes some nice products, but that camera isn't one of them. Yet its the only thing they advertise.

Maybe I should get into the business of selling garbage by advertising it via annoying ads. It certainly seems to be working well for X10. Hmmmm.

I couldn't find a single ad amongst the links. I did get an X10 pop-under, but all the news links were completely legitimate. I'm betting on a script error that threw the ad to the main window instead of a popunder, but that's not my point.

If you can't replicate a situation, it cannot be taken as fact. Since the link in question wasn't included, it's impossible to say what really happened. However, (prefaced with IANAL) this kind of "news" reporting treads dangerous ground, as you're saying something that's potentially defaming a corporation and there's no viable proof. Editors, be more careful next time. I don't want to see this site die in a cyberspace libel suit (or something similar).

Well, I *finally* found it, after refreshing the page several times. Right in that banner ad-shaped box and underneath the text that said "Advertisement". Incidentally, the link was also underneath the box that said "Technoscout" (the online retailer). Yeah, I can see how Yahoo really tried to slip this one past me.

Since Rob (cmdrtaco) is making such a big deal about Yahoo advertisements that are incidently clearly marked as advertisements, I wonder what his reaction will be when Slashdot itself begins much more aggressive advertising.

For those who missed it, about two months ago Rob posted an article here explaining that Slashdot was seriously considering running large ads (kinda like CNet, etc) and possibly pop-ups, etc sometime in the first quarter of 2002 (ie. about now) too since standard banner ads aren't getting enough click-throughs.

Oh boy, it's going to be interesting to see the backlash from readers here when the BIG ANNOYING Yahoo like ads showup here on Slashdot - then perhaps Rob's article was just a red herring to test the waters so to speak to test reader reaction to Yahoo like advertising so Slashdot can see how aggressive they can be with their own advertising. Enjoy the final days of relatively ad-free Slashdot...

I had a really long, thought out post typed out. But then slashdot went belly up. Not sure exactly what happened, but for a forum which kicks microsoft in the head each time they fubar, i find it quite ironic that at least once a day i come to find that 1: im not logged in, 2: i can't post anything, and 3: a few posts disappear into a black hole, from which they never return.

Anyways.. to recap my post.. Advertising is not a sin to me - we've had to deal with misleading adverisiments in printed press for a long time. I think the group personality here lends itself to sensationalism way too easy. Me, i'd rather see 5 banner ads on CNN than have to pay for CNN. Its not 1992 anymore, and websites carry a LOT more data than before. The internet has become a part of our economy - not a novelty relegated to just a few fortunate souls in acadamia and dialup ISP patrons browsing websites served on T1's. This is the multimedia internet, and while you or I may or may not like the barrage of images and sounds, i'd be willing to bet Joe America uses it - or else it wouldnt exist. 'Tis the nature of capitalism.

I've posted a proposed end-users bill of rights in my journal. I'd love to hear more thoughts about it. I asked slashdot about it, and, somehow, the entire post was marked as "Rejected" as soon as the submit page came back up. Interesting, eh?

Me, i'd rather see 5 banner ads on CNN than have to pay for CNN. Its not 1992 anymore, and websites carry a LOT more data than before. The internet has become a part of our economy

Well, you make a good point here, but I have mixed feelings on this issue. Yes, advertisements are a necessary evil and I too would rather see 5 banner ads (and, perhaps, even pay attention to them on occasion) than pay for CNN, but the trend that Taco points out in the article - that of "sneaky" promotion-as-news - is what I'm more concerned about.

In this case, we saw Yahoo slipping in links to unsuspecting users. In the CNN + ABC cases, we see a concerted effort by news organizations to promote products/movies/services by _artificially_ hyping them up. THAT's what I consider unacceptable: Harry Potter, while it may be a consumer phenom that merrit's some attention, is only given such phenom status when it gets (and keeps) front-page status on CNN for weeks on end.

Just this morning, in fact, I forwarded this article [cnn.com] to a friend during a similar discussion. CNN is actually promoting Survivor's "lack of being cool anymore" as a TOP news story, right on the front page. Of course they included the time and station where people can catch the finale, but that was just as a service to their readers... right?

The worst example I can remember recently was this one [cnn.com], which was in the "top news" section on the front page when it was published -- basically a meanlingless and contentless article about a lead in the JonBenet case, but one that mentioned AOL and therefore got front-page CNN coverage. No other news organizations covered the story, for obvious reasons...(it wasn't newsworthy).

While I understand that organizations need new and better ways to promote products, the trend for supposedly impartial news organizations to allow corporate promotions to taint story content is worrysome.

I am sure the same discussion happened in with
paper-based media, long time ago. I seem to recall
that a set of rules has been in effect (occasionally
encoded in the law) that specifies that advertisments
have to be somehow distingushable from the news
reported by the paper itself.

Naturally this is the high ideal, and almost no
newspaper can live up to it 100%, but anyway, history
shows that sometimes some guidelines can be
established and even followed, by and large.

The Web is different from paper media, of course, and
different situations require different rules, but to me the
it seems like we are repeating one old and well-known
problem here, and could learn from the way it was solved
in the past. Maybe some well informed slashdotter would
care to fill in the details for all of us to learn from?

I work in the online news business and this is nothing new. I'd say most news stories are based on press releases, which in turn are a way for companies to advertise new products and services without actually paying for ad space. And in the slightly-more-insidious zone, there are stories called "advertisals" that are totally advertisements, reported on by the newspaper and looking just like independent reports that are paid for as a form of advertising.

It's been done by the Times, done all the time by the Post, and for many papers is the most lucrative form of advertising. Every hear of a shopper?

What you need to remember here is that newspapers are now, and have been for a while, simply vehicles for the advertisements that make the paper money. The nickle you pay covers most of the $.27 worth of paper you're buying and is just to elevate the paper above the sleazy shoppers and coupon mags in your imagination and justify a higher ad rate. When you lay out a newspaper, you lay the ads out first...content, stories and comics and columns, are just there to fill in the dead space. It's sort of cynical to think about it this way, and it's this sort of business that leads to a reluctance to make waves with articles or opinions, for fear of losing advertisers (and not readership, which isn't as important to the immediate business of the newspaper).

This is no different from multipage ad inserts that frequently crop up in Newsweek, Time, and a variety of other "news" publications. You'll see several pages near the center of the magazine, organized in the same columnar layout, the same style of headlines and photo captions, and sometimes even the same fonts as the rest of the magazine, but they'll be stories about the Horrors of an Unclean Bowl or the Heartbreak of Psoriasis or the like, instead of real news like Clinton's new three-breasted intern. And in small type, somewhere on each page, will be the word "ADVERTISEMENT," in order to allow the reader to differentiate it from all the "real" news on the rest of the rag's full-color pages.

Magazines and newspapers have adds like these all the time. Every so often I come across an interesting headline, but about three paragraphs I start to wonder. Sure enough, there's a tiny "advertisement" on the bottom of the page.

Some of the slicker ads on tv could pass themselves of as regular tv. Anyone see the adds for blimpie sandwhiches which looked like CNN segments?

Even on radio, at least locally, there are bits that sound like "man at the field" reports, but are in fact paid ads for a car dealer or grocer.

Just my opinion here, but I thought the slashdot crowd was by definition smart enough to know when to call a spade a spade. Geeks and nerds are also supposed to be savy to pop culture, but the crowd here is so sensitive to ads as to be quite incredible. Please get a grip everyone.

This was about a year ago. Fox News did a "story" about the Subway Diet, and how Jared lost 200 pounds eating at Subway. This was about a week before the Subway commercials featuring Jared started airing on Fox.

Advertising isn't great, sure, but thats a pretty selfish way to do things; like going to church but never dropping some change in the plate. Other people are forced to deal with more intrusive advertising thanks to ad-blocking. Are you just betting on enough dumb/lazy/ignorant people to view ads to keep your experience ad-free?

Seems kinda selfish to me. If you don't like advertising, but still want your content, why don't you do something about the model that everyone has to rely on now to provide content for 'free' to the likes of you. What makes you so special that you can step to the head of the line, so long as critical mass doesn't follow your lead?

Advertising isn't great, sure, but thats a pretty selfish way to do things; like going to church but never dropping some change in the plate. Other people are forced to deal with more intrusive advertising thanks to ad-blocking. Are you just betting on enough dumb/lazy/ignorant people to view ads to keep your experience ad-free?

Ad banners are one of the main causes of the dot bomb.

Its my net connection and computer, I will determine what travels into my system.

Most 3rd party banner services are privacy killers.

If I like content, I always hit the tip jar if its available.

Is skipping ads with a TiVo any different?

Smart web masters will set up their ads to defeat my filters. Most of the time its trivial to defeat ads. "/ads/", hello?

90% of what I filter is "ads.doubleclick.net" and "servedby.advertising.com"

Ads are ugly and the flashing animation could almost set off epileptic seizures.

I don't believe in your imaginary friend so I am unlikely to put money in its plate.

Frankly, I don't care about dumb/lazy/ignorant people. Its their lot in life to suffer.

What makes you so special that you can step to the head of the line, so long as critical mass doesn't follow your lead?

Because I can. Its my freedom of choice...I choose to live as AD free as possible.

Sorry about the conservative slag, but I do tend to learn towards socialism and a kind of forced 'taking it for the team' approach to community. That is, I don't mind being a martyr if everyone will join me.;)

No problem. Too many people think that personal responsibility is a conservative value. I believe you cannot have liberty without personal responsibility and self determination. No offense but I see socialism as the absence of personal responsibility as the group as a whole will take care you when you make poor choices and you are only as strong as your weakest link.

I do have to disagree with the banner-responsible-for-bust thing.

I think if you go back and read what I typed that it was 'one of the main' not 'the main' cause of the dot bomb. But the reliance on banner ads instead of charging for content from the beginning has convinced the web viewing public that all content should be free -- outside of pr0n which had the right business plan from the start. Make the suckers pay upfront.

Alternatively, the yahoo database could've been screwed up and no story content was associated with the link. So, when users clicked the link they were fed the template (including banner ad) but no additional content. So, it could be a screw up... However, as far as I know there is no group that has oversight on such issues, and there would be nothing (except consumer reaction) that would stop Yahoo from doing something like that.

Contrast that to members of the American Society of Magazine Editors [magazine.org] who must follow strict guidlines about the inclusion and identification of advertising content (in both paper and online publications). Their ethical standards (Here [magazine.org]) include:

Neither links nor other references to special advertising sections, or "advertorials," shall appear in the table of contents, directory of contents, or in any listing of editorial content of an online publication.

and

The layout, design and type face of advertising pages should be distinctly different from the publication's normal layout, design and type faces.

Does anyone know if Yahoo or any other portals have been pressured to accept such codes of ethics?

Not necessarily. How many people read InfoWorld, InfoWeek, Mac World, Mac Week, Computer Buyer,... The list goes on and on of "magazines" that, as far as I can tell, are nothing but advertisements. Yet many decent magazines have gone under while these are still going strong.

It is my fear that as more venues repackage ads as news (TV news has been doing it for years), more people will just kick back and take the ads as news. I'm not sure if that's cause or effect of my cynicism. Maybe both.

Actually the free p*rn sites have been doing this for years! If this is true, then they are taking a page from the p*rn people. That is how they get people to go to specific sites. At least they haven't started sending you to the customers site.